


The Fantastic Falcon

by TaleWorthTelling



Series: Sam Wilson Explains It All (Or He's Very Successful At Pretending To) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 17:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2076609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is a family man. This is his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fantastic Falcon

**Author's Note:**

> This has been turning out pretty long with a lot of little threads, so I'm hoping that if I post it as a series it'll be easier to finish. Call it the snapshots making up the collage of Sam's new life. He's a pretty busy guy.

 

 

Breaking the news to his family that he’d taken up the wings again (which were technically classified and he definitely hadn’t told them about, of course not a word, you dig?) was a mixed sort of endeavor. He had nieces and nephews who thought it was nothing short of awe-inspiring that their Uncle Sam, the doctor (which he wasn’t, but try telling stubborn kids the difference between counseling and therapy), was a bona fide, genuine superhero. They could turn on the news to see him and everything. He was on a level playing field with Captain America (their early childhood idol) and _Iron Man_ (their current fascination). His little six-year-old niece had a Falcon _toothbrush_ that lit up when you pressed the button on his smiling face. There was talk about rebooting the Captain America comic franchise and whether Sam would be interested in allowing his likeness to be used.

Look, Sam was already the cool uncle, but now he was a god.

His sisters and aunts were not as impressed. You could even say they were sort of pissed. Talked about how he hadn’t thought this through, how it was unnecessarily dangerous, how he’d done his time and gotten out and didn’t need this. He couldn’t just drop his whole life to follow Captain America around like a good lapdog. They stayed kind of frosty about it until one particularly striking picture went viral: Sam pulling a pair of twin three-year-olds out of a building seconds before the whole thing went down, crumbling concrete and steel blurring like rain in the background.

They got it then. Didn’t like it, but they got it.

He dragged himself out of bed only a few hours after he’d gone to sleep and several hours before he’d have liked to be up, but he’d promised the kids that he’d show for Andy’s birthday party and he was an uncle of his word. Winged fire-breathing robots couldn’t keep him from them.

Singe him a little in some uncomfortable places, but not stop him.

He showered, dressed, and grabbed his Falcon gift-wrapped present on his way out the door.

The party was in full swing when he got to the park, kids running around sticky with snacks and grimy with dirt. As he loped over one of them faceplanted straight into the ground by his feet, shook himself off, and got back up to take off running after someone else.

Kids were indestructible, man.

The party was nice and he got the chance to relax in the cool summer breeze, watch the trees sway, in between a revolving door of conversations with relatives and family friends. He loved spending time with them – he really did – but, damn, was he exhausted, so they didn’t seem to mind that he mostly responded monosyllabically and with his eyes half-way shut.

Laughed at him, sure, but didn’t mind.

Still, he summoned the superhero will that allowed him to charge into a firefight and found his second wind when the kid went to open his presents. Sam had gotten him a chemistry set and a rare Captain America comic book.

“That Cap stuff’s nice and all,” said Andy after thanking him politely, juice box in hand and eyes skeptical, “but it’s for babies, Uncle Sam. I’m eleven now.”

“Yeah, Cap doesn’t even have a gun or anything,” chimed in Shawn, fourteen and way too interested in explosions.

Sam supposed that was par for the course. He tried to remember if he’d liked shoot-‘em-ups and fireballs when he was that age and had a hard time getting through the faint nausea that brought up, so he let it go. Instead he thought about Steve Rogers, who most certainly was _not_ for babies, or children, or indeed the faint of heart. Even people with exceptionally strong constitutions had trouble with that guy, who definitely knew how to shoot a gun – Sam had seen it first hand, and Steve didn’t hesitate to do what he had to do. He didn’t need a gun to creatively and effectively put an attacker down, anyway. Cap fought to win and he took any advantage he could get. Sam had seen plenty of nasty action, but some part of him still managed to be occasionally stunned at the way Steve the man differed from the hero he’d pictured as a kid: he’d have thought that Steve believed in fighting honorably and fairly, but he came in time to realize that Steve didn’t believe _any_ fight could be honorable, so he tried to end it quickly instead. Steve was a dirty scrapper, when it came down to it, fighting with swift and brutal precision at the best of times, and clawing fiercely at the worst.

But these kids didn’t need to know about the blood they’d washed down the shower drain or the guy Steve had saved by plunging his hand into his gut to hold him together until help arrived. That was significantly less than kid-friendly and he thanked God every one of his days on this earth that they couldn’t conceive of those things. They still thought about how badass he was, not that he’d used those badass skills to end more than one life, whether it was justified or not.

Sam would settle those debts with his maker one day, but until then he slept okay thinking about his family.

He’d developed a certain protective instinct toward Steve, though, and he wanted everyone to be as in love with him as he was; he figured this was what Bucky had dealt with decades before, and he could see where it had come from now. “You saw me on the news Tuesday, right?” Sam asked lightly. When they smiled and nodded excitedly, he continued. “That move I dropped the lizard dude with? The flip thing? Cap taught me that.”

That move defied gravity and all logic, but he’d seen the replays: it was _cool_. And sexy as hell when Steve was teaching him, hard muscles twisting and bunching impressively (dare he say heroically?), but that was neither here nor neither.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. Old guy’s got a lot of tricks tucked up his sleeves. I can’t always be the one teaching him everything.”

“Wait,” Susan, his sister, cut in, eyes squinted at the book she held delicately in her manicured hands. “Is this signature real?”

Andy’s eyes went huge and round. “Oh, my God! He signed it?” He squeaked excitedly and held out his hand for the book to examine it.

Guess he hadn’t seen it the first time. Sam smiled to himself. Steve had written a little birthday message for him, and unlike other book graffiti, his actually increased the value, which was funny in a way Sam couldn’t explain. Didn’t matter, though. You could tell, no matter what Andy conjured up about being too old for childhood hero stories that didn’t involve robots, that he was never getting rid of that thing.


End file.
